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Jobs for Kids

By Lisa Belkin August 10, 2010 12:30 pmAugust 10, 2010 12:30 pm

At what age should a child start working? Is it their “job” to pay for the extras, or even the necessities, in their lives? Or is their “job” to navigate school, get into (and out of) college and then support themselves?

These questions have been popping up in my in-box lately.

Item No. 1: Over at the Wall Street Journal’s Web site this weekend, Jeff P. Opdyke raised them in an essay titled “Should I Make My 13-year-old Get a Job?” Yes, he knows that child labor laws would make most employment illegal at that age, but there are options, his father writes — like becoming a referee at community soccer games. Yet when Opdyke and his wife decided that the boy really should be paying for more of his electronic doodads out of money earned himself, they discovered he had no work ethic. And, his father realizes, this is mostly his parents’ fault:

So, why, you no doubt ask, don’t I just tell him to get a job? It may come to that. But in truth, I’m torn.

Part of me wants him to work so that he can appreciate what it means to earn money, to understand explicitly how much sweat goes into whatever he wants to buy. Amy and I also want him to experience physical, maybe even uncomfortable, low-paying work so that he might find the motivation in college to pursue a career that will allow him to live and raise a family comfortably.

And yet … I want him to enjoy his childhood as much as I enjoyed mine. I’m also reluctant to take time away from his schoolwork, as well as travel soccer, which eats up an awful lot of his weekends. He’s awfully good and enjoys it immensely.

Perhaps most important: I want him to have the freedom to travel the world with me in my new job, since I’m convinced exposure to other cultures and other values and beliefs is the best education a child can get. Having to regularly seek time off from a job wouldn’t go over well with an employer.

Item No. 2: An e-mail message from a friend, lamenting the fact that she cannot find a teenager to babysit for her 7-year-old son during the coming school year because:

… the kids don’t think it’s worth giving up their Saturday nights for what they think is an insignificant amount of money (it’s not insignificant to me!) and their parents don’t push them to work because they don’t want to overstress them with something else on their schedule. When I was 15, I babysat every Saturday night, then scooped ice-cream all summer and walked neighbors’ dogs and used that money for movies and clothes shopping and, eventually, gas for the car when I was allowed to borrow it. When my son is old enough you can be sure he will do the same. But it sure looks like I’m the exception when it comes to parents who expect their kids to contribute. Isn’t there supposed to be a recession going on?

Item No. 3: An article in this month’s issue of Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors, about the downsides of holding a job while attending college. More college students are working than ever before — 45 percent of full-time students now work, compared with 32 percent in 1970. And they are working longer hours. Twenty-one percent work 20 to 34 hours a week, compared with 10 percent in 1970; and 8 percent of full-time students also hold a 35-hour-plus-per-week job, double the percentage as recently as 1990.

Studies have consistently shown that students who work part-time while attending classes full-time have better grades and a lower drop out rate. But those studies find that the ideal number of work hours for students is 10 to 15 hours a week. In the Academe article, Laura W. Perna, a professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that these longer hours are hurting students. She writes:

…trying to meet the multiple and sometimes conflicting simultaneous demands of the roles of student, employee … and so on often creates high levels of stress and anxiety, making it less likely that students will complete their degrees.

Should your preteen be working at all? Should your teenager be working more? Should your college student be working less?

About

We're all living the family dynamic, as parents, as children, as siblings, uncles and aunts. At Motherlode, lead writer and editor KJ Dell’Antonia invites contributors and commenters to explore how our families affect our lives, and how the news affects our families—and all families. Join us to talk about education, child care, mealtime, sports, technology, the work-family balance and much more